Pansori and han in the film Sopyonje

¶ … Impression

The song sung by the woman as the video opens is a Korean folk song, known as pansori. She sings while a man plays a drum just by tapping it occasionally. The song is sad, and she utters a kind of wailing, not a very cheerful sound. The second scene in which the pansori is sung is a man who seems to be yelling more than singing. There is a strong sense of community in the group of Korean men in white. Soon the whole group is involved in the guttural, chanting, in the yelling and moving (swaying back and forth).

This video is a story, made into a film that received good reviews and became a well-representative part of Korean culture. There are no subtitles so the language is not familiar to English speaking viewers. The song sung and played throughout the film relates to "han," which is representative of loss and sorrow in Korea.

It is known that this video was made after the end of WWII. Korea was facing changes, and after the Japanese had occupied their country and made many Korean women into "comfort women" (using them sexually, basically putting them in sexual slavery), there was sadness and the coming to terms with this sadness (han) music is important.

A man is teaching children the pansori, and he is harsh in his scolding when they don't sing it correctly. He plays that drum, with just a slap on the top of the drum to keep time. Twenty four minutes into the film a play takes place, in which a young man and young woman are singing to each other in front of an audience that is sitting and very reverent.

Then a scene in which a mean man is beating a singing woman who is strapped to a board. The children cry as the woman strapped down continues to sing the pansori. The main plot (which involves pansori, which is a dying art in Korea) is a man who is very good at the pansori travels from one place to another, finding buildings that were abandoned during the war, and practicing his art as well as presenting it (with his two adopted children) as entertainment. As the protagonist travels around the family practices pansori anywhere, including in a tree. When the drum is played, the drummer clicks the top of the drum with a stick, and slaps the skin of the drum with his left hand. There is a slow but deliberate rhythm to the percussion.

They sing while wandering the countryside which makes for dramatic landscape scenes. The wandering former pansori master is not very patient with his children. Much of what the audience sees is sadness, which relates to the "han" that the director was promoting. Sadness and scolding dominate much of the film. When the father yells loudly at the daughter and she tried to do it as he wants her to, the brother outside yells at his father to stop the harassment of his sister.

The father charges out and confronts the son and there is a violence exchange. The father is kicking the son and the son runs away but his sister quickly catches up to him and urges him to rethink running away.

There is a sense of a rite of passage for the children of the pansori man traveling throughout Korea. The children are made to learn the songs and drum beat that are part of the pansori. This might be the way it was in the old days in Korea, before the Japanese occupied the country for more than 30 years. It is a rite of passage, and a reflection of how things were.